Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  The then completely unspoilt Trnovo suburb of Ljubljana was immortalized by the nineteenth-century Slovene poet France Prešeren. Here he had first glimpsed the beautiful Julia, graceful, self-contained and shy, as she passed through the oak doors of the old church:

  Kupído! ti in tvoja lepa starka,

  Ne bosta dalje me za nos vodila;

  Ne bom pel vaj’ne hvale brez plačila

  Do konca dni, ko siromak Petrarka

  (Cupid! you fool me no more,

  I am not whom you are for;

  I will not sing your praise

  Like Petrarch till the end of days)

  One morning, strolling through this still untracked and semirural suburb, I heard some words of English being spoken by two strikingly pretty young women. One was Slovene, the other was English. In those days, hearing English spoken in Central Europe was sufficiently unusual to occasion immediate mutual astonishment and we soon fell into conversation. They were both members of the National Slovene Theatre’s corps de ballet. Somehow I must have mentioned to the Slovene woman with mesmerizing blue eyes that I was a horn player and indeed had my horn with me. In very little time, I had agreed to audition the following week at the Ljubljana Opera House.

  The opera house was a masterpiece of Central European neo-rococo. Designed in the 1880s by two Czech architects, Hráský and Hruby, in the best Imperial Schlagobers (whipped cream) style, it made up in ornate decoration what it lacked in scale. As I approached the main entrance, horn case in hand, at the appointed hour, the door opened and a diminutive man in blue uniform bowed stiffly and escorted me up some side stairs into a practice room with a Bechstein grand in the corner. Once again bowing formally, he left me to unpack the horn and begin practising.

  As I was warming up, a knock on the door announced a member of the house’s staff who, giving me a knowing smile, placed a vast pile of music on the piano; this was my sight-reading and fortunately (a huge advantage) I had twenty minutes to look at it. I had barely scanned the last passage when with a great flourish the door was thrown open to admit the audition committee. This consisted of the principal trumpet, the deputy conductor, the principal trombonist, the Intendant’s secretary and the same doorman who had met me so formally on arrival. The capable Marshal Tito had pioneered a form of Communism known as ‘self-management’ which meant that all important decisions were in practice taken by him and carefully selected lieutenants, while all decisions of lesser importance were made by a committee, thus emasculating any potential rivals. With the bureaucratic relentlessness of those times, this system had percolated down to the organization of every concern, be it political, economic or cultural, and now at the opera house it involved the doorman in the selection of the artists.

  To my surprise and delight, after I had given a passable rendition of a Mozart horn concerto, the committee was unanimous in recommending me for the post of principal horn. Another porter, resplendent in blue uniform and cap – the old Habsburg traditions had not died completely – ushered me into a smoke-filled office where the Artistic Director of the opera house was vigorously extinguishing a cigarette into a flat copper ashtray. Maestro Cvetko was the archetypal provincial opera-house Intendant. Invariably dressed in brown suit, faded grey shirt and brown bow tie, he reserved the splashes of colour for his scarlet scarf and navy-blue beret. Large glasses magnified frog-like black eyes. On his desk were piles of paper, a pre-war typewriter and two unemptied ashtrays. He spoke the old Austrian German of the Slovene provinces with rolled consonants and guttural vowels and politely offered me an unfiltered Bosnian cigarette from a large silver box. He was a busy man who came straight to the point. Taking a file from beneath a pile of seemingly haphazardly arranged documents, he pushed a piece of paper before me, already filled out with immaculate copperplate handwriting, and asked me to sign at the bottom. ‘You will start with La Bohème on 3 February. Gut? Sehr Gut. Auf Wiedersehen. Hvala Lepa … Nasvidenje.’ (Good? Very good. Goodbye. Thank you … See you again).

  I rushed to find the two members of the corps de ballet to thank them for their inspiration, only to find that both had resigned from Ljubljana the previous week and moved on to other theatres in Northern Europe in quest of the bright lights of the West. Alas, I would never set eyes on either of them again.

  Like Trieste, Ljubljana was somewhat Austrian in atmosphere, but it had a youthful buzz which was very different from the old Adriatic port. The population of the city seemed much younger and more energetic. Most of those who became my friends were orchestral musicians more or less of my own age. The Slovenes were serious, with a penchant towards the sardonic in their use of humour. After the vivid personalities of the Italians in Trieste, they seemed at first almost introspective, with a great sense of precision and a pedantic concern for bureaucratic detail. Alpine environments breed self-reliant, physically and mentally tough people, but their horizons can be close at hand. After the sophistication of Trieste and even Zagreb, this was immediately apparent.

  The regime at the opera house was benign. The 1970s Cambridge tradition of light preparation which had made us ‘the best sight-readers in Europe’ – two rehearsals for each concert, which meant up to fifty-two performances a term – on average nearly one a day – had not yet penetrated continental Europe. Operas were painstakingly rehearsed over several weeks before they were performed. As a result, an orchestra which was probably not as innately skilled as the one in which I had played at Cambridge – we had after all been conducted by Britten and Tippett and had accompanied Yehudi Menuhin in Elgar’s Violin Concerto – nevertheless played with discipline and a fine sense of ensemble. We had sixteen rehearsals for La Bohème and months went by practising Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Occasionally, the old Cambridge skills were required. In the great tradition of many Central European opera houses, the Ljubljana Opera House was also a repertory company: we did not always perform the same few operas for two months on end but instead might play through fifteen different operas a month. Some of the older productions could be revived at the drop of a hat. Quite often, even the musicians were taken by surprise.

  One evening, after a few weeks of working at the theatre, I arrived ready to play the straightforward first horn part of Rigoletto only to be told that the Intendant had decided to cancel the Verdi an hour earlier and that I would now be playing the more challenging part in Borodin’s Knez (Prince) Igor, a score I did not know and which was riddled with cuts and other uncertainties. My younger horn-playing colleague attempted to guide me through the cuts in the ten minutes before the curtain went up but there was still much to check when time ran out. We navigated the first hour successfully and my colleague and I were carefully counting our rests when there descended a solemn hush broken only by some nervous whispering. I looked up from counting my rests and saw Maestro Kobler, a giant of a man bursting out of his wing collar and white tie and with slicked-back Brylcreemed hair, urgently pointing his baton in my direction. I looked at the score in front of me and spotted a pencil line running down the page to a bar marked solo fortissimo. I blasted out the first two notes before being drowned out by a chorus of ssshh from the trombonists behind me. My colleague quickly pointed to another pencil line on the page which led to a single note to be played pianissimo and on which the tenor was waiting to begin his aria. Nobody in the audience appeared to notice my solecism and it led to no unfortunate consequences. Maestro Kobler had been broken in by earlier generations of Slovene musicians but, as an example of the perils of sight-reading revised opera scores, it remained vividly etched in the memory.

  Nearly all the musicians were from the Communist bloc. A Swiss member of the corpo balletto and I were the only Western Europeans (Gast-Arbeiter we mischievously styled ourselves) employed in the house. Otherwise there were Russians, Romanians, Slovaks and Hungarians, paid what was in those days a readily convertible currency: the Yugoslav dinar. Indeed, we were reasonably well remunerated, certainly enough to enjoy the superb cuisine of the PEN Internatio
nal club restaurant, a few villas away from the opera house where unforgettable Palatschinken and tender fillet steaks could be had for a fraction of the price we would then have paid in Paris or London. After each performance, a group of us would make our way there to fall upon these delicacies with the ravenous hunger only post-performance musicians and athletes seem to share.

  The opera-house schedule was undemanding and the orchestral musicians were considered to lead a fairly easy life compared to Ljubljana’s two other orchestras, the Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Slovene Philharmonic, who regularly toured Yugoslavia. Our week began with a Sunday-evening performance, usually an Italian opera, Rigoletto or La traviata or L’elisir d’amore. As the week progressed there was at least one performance of Puccini, La Bohème or Madame Butterfly, or Borodin’s Knez Igor, the last of which was a great favourite among the Communist nomenklatura. Interspersed between these were various Russian ballets and works by Rossini and Verdi. By Friday morning, everyone was looking forward to the weekend which, there being usually no performances on Friday or Saturday evenings, began immediately after a schools matinee performance. Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia may have closed down monasteries, arrested priests, banished convents and expelled most religious orders but it still took its Sundays very seriously. All shops were closed and Ljubljana was deserted at weekends until Sunday evening brought the stirrings of cultural and social life back to the city.

  As soon as the Friday matinee was finished, a couple of colleagues and I would often hitch a lift down to the Quarnero coast. Like the Red Sea, the Adriatic at its head forks into two branches, divided in this case by the triangular peninsula of Istria. The eastern arm, hemmed in by lofty mountains and broken up into long and intricate channels by rugged islands whose crests sometimes rival the height of those of the mainland, is known as the Quarnero. Opposite is the port of Rijeka, D’Annunzio’s Fiume, which we would generally reach by 4.30 p.m., in time to catch one of the many early-evening ferries heading off towards Dalmatia.

  In those days, drivers throughout Yugoslavia felt little hesitation in offering lifts to strangers and the journey south was easily accomplished, especially if one of the female members of the corps de ballet was of our party. Our most popular destination was Rab, known to the Italians as Arbe, an exquisite small island just two hours’ sail from Rijeka. The island’s lush vegetation of myrtle and pine could be smelt miles out to sea. Another horn player, Boyan, a native of Ilirska Bistrica, a village on the forbidding limestone karst, seemed to know where to stay, although he warned us not to get too close to the local young women, lest ‘our intentions were misunderstood’. ‘Island girls’, he hinted darkly, ‘need to be handled very carefully.’ A natural reticence prevented my ever discovering the truth of Boyan’s words, but Lillian, a dark-haired half-Italian, half-Swiss dancer from the corps de ballet, soon became the object of several of the island boys’ attentions. Boyan kept a vigilant and protective eye on her, but our many hours on Rab were otherwise mostly passed in sunny ignorance of the dynamics of teenage life in communities where modern Communism had been reinforced by centuries of Roman Catholic conservatism. On Sundays, after an early lunch of local fish accompanied by an inexpensive bottle of Malvasia wine, we caught the ferry to Rijeka for what could be a tense race to hitch a lift back to the opera house to be in our black tie for the Sunday-evening performance. The leader of the orchestra, a charming elderly violinist who rejoiced in the name of Rotar, would throw us a cynical smile as his horn section settled in with just a few seconds to spare before the conductor strode on to the podium.

  During the week, any spare time I enjoyed between rehearsals and performances was usually devoted to studying Plečnik in the Ljubljana architectural museum, which contained all his papers. His correspondence from Rome and Vienna was particularly interesting and revealing of his personality. Plečnik hated the noise and poor wine of Italy after his native Slovenia and had little patience with the sophisticated cosmopolitanism of Vienna. Like every Slovene, his food and wine mattered immensely to him and many of his letters from Vienna are punctuated by the phrase ‘Jed je grozno’ (The food is disgusting).

  One of Plečnik’s central beliefs was that the southern Slavs deserved their own style of architecture which could express their historical roots and their cultural aspirations. He rejected the imperial styles, both the classical ‘Third Rococo’ of the Habsburg cities and the Viennese Jugendstil, which he saw as a visual expression of German cultural domination. The Slavs, he believed, hailed from an older culture, that of the eastern Mediterranean, and therefore the Slovenes, the westernmost protagonists of the southern Slavic world, should have an architectural language which corresponded to that heritage. Just as Prague developed an indigenous Cubist architectural style after 1918, Slovenia also developed a few years later a new architectural vocabulary which indelibly shaped the appearance of its capital.

  Studying in Rome before the First World War, Plečnik had become absorbed in the decorative details of vernacular Roman architecture. Near his rooms in the Palazzo Venezia, which was then the Imperial Austrian embassy, he saw capitals of columns placed haphazardly into the wall and he later sought to incorporate the design of these fragments into his works. In Ljubljana, he translated such forms into a series of structures which to this day give the old town its distinctive character, immediately distinguishing it from other former Habsburg cities. His Three Bridges, at the centre of the city, is an ingenious solution to the problem of preserving an existing nineteenth-century bridge of great merit. By adding two pedestrian bridges to the original he expanded its capacity. By adorning them with Ionic capital motifs he anchored the entire structure in a modern, novel reinterpretation of the ancient classical vocabulary which expressed a distinctive Slovene style. These bridges and the other elements of Plečnik’s work in Ljubljana offer a striking contrast to the older Austrian fabric of the city which appears so similar to Graz and other Central European towns. Harnessing Plečnik’s genius to the planning of the city in the 1920s and 1930s, the Slovene authorities ensured that Ljubljana would become a place of pilgrimage for architectural students thereafter.

  My studies were immensely assisted by one of Plečnik’s pupils, Edo Ravnikar, a retired professor of architecture and one of the most prolific architects of late-1960s Ljubljana. Ravnikar was serious, intelligent and well informed about current events including even politics, a subject upon which most Slovenes were at the time generally reluctant to express a view. He was also a great gastronome. Each week, on the one afternoon I had off from the opera house, we would visit a private restaurant. The curious hybrid system of limited capitalism within the framework of state Communism which marked Yugoslavia in the early 1980s allowed private enterprise to flourish in limited areas. In Ljubljana, regulations only permitted private restaurants outside a 3-mile radius of the city centre. Inside that circle, all restaurants were, in theory, owned by the state, so this network of private places sprang up on the fringes of the city. Standards were high because owners took pride in their establishments, and wanted customers to leave feeling they had enjoyed the best cooking, wine and service in Slovenia.

  Although Ravnikar had designed and built much of modern Ljubljana, he was not a wealthy man: the Titoist regime denied riches to all except a chosen few in the Communist Party leadership. Nonetheless the Professor had enough money to eat and drink well, and he made it his business to ensure that our informal ‘seminars’ on the architecture of Plečnik were conducted in a different private restaurant each week. In this way I was introduced to a wonderful range of Slovene wines, especially the prized Terran of Istria. One favourite haunt was a modest establishment in Trnovo, barely more than a Biedermeier bungalow, surrounded by vegetable gardens and run by a Bulgarian. The Bulgar was taciturn but renowned for the quality of his cellar. Perhaps as a counterpoint, he encouraged us to eat raw spring onions, unfailingly served as a Vorspeise which were also supposed to guard against diseases of the blood. Ravnikar looked o
n as I gingerly tried these delicacies for the first time. ‘I suppose in London and Cambridge, this would not be usual,’ he said with a note of pride, pushing another plate of onions, pungent, trimmed and washed, in my direction.

  Ravnikar was in his early seventies. He always wore a jacket and long-collared shirt and peered thoughtfully at me through thick spectacles. He lived in the penthouse of one of the blocks of flats he had designed behind the main boulevard of the city, inevitably named Cesta Marshalova Titova. The flat, built of brick and wood, was generously planned though minimally furnished, and the space was filled with light. He was keen that I should understand as much as possible about Plečnik’s mentality, his closeness to his brother, a Roman Catholic priest, his simple piety and his utter rejection of the modern Corbusian aesthetic. These would have been invaluable lessons for any student of architectural history, but for anyone developing a wider knowledge of the complex tapestry of South-eastern Europe they were a source of insight of enduring value.

  Like the rest of Yugoslavia in 1981, Slovenia appeared to be in a state of political suspended animation. Marshal Tito, the pioneer of strategic non-alignment, delicately balancing favours from East and West, had begun his career as a Communist partisan fighting the Nazi Germans. He had died the previous May after a long illness. Newspaper editors throughout Europe had commissioned obituaries which had turned yellow with age as the dictator lingered on in a clinic a few hundred yards away from where I worked in the opera house. An elaborate plan had been devised to ensure that after his death the country’s centrifugal forces (several different nationalities and religions) would not erupt, but no one believed that the system would survive long without him. The architectural historian Damjan Prelovšek warned me one afternoon as we were examining some of the remarkable Plečnik furniture in his villa. ‘You will see. If you stay here for longer, you will really experience something.’